What's Privacy Worth?

What is this thing "privacy" that we seem to be in constant peril of losing?  In Europe it seems to be treated like a sacred substance, with various laws protecting it.  In America it has significantly less value, being signed away by private citizens to corporations hungry for consumer data, without a second thought.  What is it, exactly?

I think there are probably a couple of components to privacy:

1. Information: Meaningful data about someone.  Some information we're only to happy to push out to the world as environmental spam: the car we drive, the house we live in, the brand of shirts we wear.  So the existence of information by itself doesn't constitute privacy.  There's an additional component.
2. Restricted Access:  Not just anyone can get all of our information.  Some of it is private, and can only be accessed by the appropriate individuals.  We have different ways of categorizing access - for example we pretty much hand the keys to the kingdom for our financial information over to our accountants, but probably wouldn't tell them everything (or anything, necessarily) about our health.

But still there's more.  The real truth is that most of what is controversial these days about privacy has to do with observation of our behavior.  Where did we shop?  Where did we surf?  What did we buy?  What are we likely to buy?

Ok - this kind of information is valuable.  And in our society we have a mechanism to deal with the transfer of value from one party to another.  Its called "money".

Show. Me. The. Money.

How about this - lets create a trade unit with which I can distribute my privacy.  A "consumer behavior credit".  A credit is defined as:

• The right to my observed behavior,
• For a specified period of time,
• Within a specified scope,
• For a specified use.

So for example, I might grant you the right to watch me surf around on amazon, spending way too much on books.  So I could sell, for fair market value, 1 day of me surfing book websites, for the purpose of channelling advertising to me.  $5.00 please.

Lets make it easy.  A marketplace for consumer credits.  OpenID style.  I (the consumer) sign up for credits, and set business rules under which you may observe my behavior (for $).  Perhaps I can have "personas" which allow me to separate "Business Loren" from "Fun Loving Guitar Phreak Loren".  Then, a website that participates in the program can happily harvest my information, sending me compensation for it, and use it according to the terms of the license.

You get your information, and I get compensated for what my privacy is worth.